THE

BAPTIST MISSIONARY MAGAZINE.

VOL. XXVII.

JANUARY, 1847.

NO. 1.

ure.

"THE WORK IS GREAT."

The design of evangelical missions to the heathen is to impart that knowledge of God and Jesus Christ which is life eternal. Whatever is short of this, is failA rude nation may be taught the use of letters; schools of science may be founded and multiplied; the people may be trained to habits of industry and virtue; they may adopt the usages and manners of Christian nations; they may be led to cast away their idol-worship, and to acknowledge the being and perfections of the "Eternal God;”—but if this be all,—if they be not brought to the belief and acknowledgment of the truth as it is in Jesus,—the grand object of the work of missions is still to be attained.

This work is great. It is great

IN ITS LOCAL EMBARRASSMENTS.

The fields of its operation are remote, in lands beyond the sea, difficult often of access, and unfavorable to frequent intercommunication of tidings, encouragement, and home supplies. It is wrought in unwholesome climes, beneath burning suns and amidst poisonous exhalations; causing the laborer to stoop wearily beneath his burden, or casting him down on his couch of mortal languishment even in the morning freshness of his days. It is wrought on a foreign soil, among a strange people, of strange speech, customs, and manners, and of stranger habits of thought and feeling; under the sway, not seldom, of absolute, capricious, and cruel princes, and open to popular violence and bloody revolutions.

The work is great

IN ITS ESSENTIAL PRELIMINARY LABORS.

These barbarous languages the missionary must make his own; these unaccustomed habits of thought, and feeling, and illustration, must grow familiar. He must explore the heathen mind, search out its hidden passages and “chambers of imagery," remove its accumulated mould, and trace anew on the quickened conscience the natural law written with the finger of God. In numerous instances he must forge and furbish, at least in this our day, his instruments of labor. He finds, it may be, a people gifted indeed with the power of articulate speech, but having no visible and permanent expression of oral sounds. He must provide an alphabet for them; and he must provide it in circumstances extremely unpropitious. He must give representations, not to familiar sounds, sounds of his own native tongue ;-to which he has been wonted from infancy, 1

VOL. XXVII.

and can enunciate, therefore, unaided, with uniform and conscious precision;but to sounds new and strange, sounds apparently indeterminate, and varying with individual peculiarities of utterance, confused, baffling the ear, and compelling to continual repetition. To identify and fix these elementary sounds, to give them a several and skilfully adjusted form, and then to embody them in words, not copied even from rude etchings on barks of trees, but written out from the lips of ruder men,-this work is no light task.-And when the missionary has given thus to fleeting sounds a "local habitation," he is next to ascertain and mark their significations. It belongs to him to furnish a vocabulary; a vocabulary, too, which shall be discriminating and ample; serving not merely to suggest the generic ideas of words, but indicating their varied applications and consequent varieties of meaning. Moreover, he must analyze the structure of the language, and learn what usages it has in common with other languages, and what its idiomatic peculiarities; and must embody them in rules. In short, he must compile dictionary, and grammar, and spelling-book, before he can prosecute, to the best advantage, his proper missionary work; and he must do it, too, in the midst of efforts to convey to the dark minds around him, though with stammering tongue, some faint conceptions of God, and holiness, and salvation.

Suppose this preparatory work to have been accomplished,—and much of it must have been done, if not in full, outward form, yet mentally at least, before the missionary can prosecute his main design to advantage, there is a second intermediate labor, preliminary, yet partaking of the evangelical character. The missionary must give to this hitherto unlettered people, the written revelation of God. He must translate the word of God into their newly embodied dialect; and he must so translate it that the translation shall express to his own apprehension the inspired originals as he receives them, and shall, also, as far as depends upon the adaptation of words to usages, both old and new, convey the same meaning to those for whom it was intended. This work is also exceedingly arduous, and compels to protracted and painful labor. To do it well, implies qualifications manifold and rare. It demands not only a knowledge of the Sacred Scriptures in their originals, but an intimate acquaintance with the principles of universal language, and especially as involved in the one about to be made a representative and interpreter of the oracles of God; together with a power and habit of just discrimination, susceptibilities deeply inwrought with the spirit of the gospel, and a capacity, withal, of resolute and unwearied, though it may be unseen, toil. There must also be provided, in close connexion with the work of biblical translation,—and they are often its precursors, biblical compends, catechisms, narratives, and biographies; while tracts illustrative of Christian truth and duty, and carefully adapted to the capacities, the modes of thought and action, and the moral necessities of the people, must be written and multiplied in almost limitless profusion. The work is great

IN THE INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIAL STATE OF ITS SUBJECTS.

A heathen language subdued, and its elements reduced to order and made available both for written and oral communication; the word of God translated and printed numerously; a religious literature created; the living preacher endued with the power of a ready utterance in this new tongue, and an open door of access to the people set before him; he is yet to do the proper work for which he was sent; that heathen people are yet to be evangelized. The

bread of life has been provided, but it has not been set before them; the cup of salvation has been poured forth, but not presented to their lips. The missionary goes abroad among the people. He stands at the corners of the streets, or in the market places. He mingles with the crowd of idol-worshippers on festive days, or as they come and go along their jungle paths. The passers-by, drawn by the strangeness of his garb or countenance, gather around him, listen awhile to his stranger tidings, and then pass on. Others succeed, and others, and others still; and the preacher repeats the message to their unconscious ears, till, spent with fatigue, and sorrowful that no man cares for truth or life, the declining sun reminds him to return to his lowly dwelling, to wait on God and renew his strength for to-morrow's equal toil. Or he essays a process seemingly less bold, though not less promising of ultimate success. He wins, by studied kindness, the affections and confidence of the neighborhood in which he lives; gathers for a season, by long-continued and laborious appliances, an elementary school; and while he imparts the rudiments of human science so fast as they learn to appreciate and can receive them, seeks, by continual iteration, to communicate also the elements of the knowledge that brings salvation.

And now begins to be developed the proper arduousness of the missionary enterprise. Before, in the acquisition and reduction of a barbarous language, or in the translation and compilation of scriptures, and tracts, and elementary works, the missionary measured his progress mainly by his own efficiency. Helps were needed, but they were helps to his personal agency, helps that exacted little of mental or moral efficiency in others, and were easily subject to his bidding. The labor was of a kind, also, to demand comparatively few minds for its execution. And when done, it was done for all. The Burman bible, the product of the toilsome labor of many years, has consumed the days and nights of only an individual missionary; and though other minds and other years of labor may impart to the work a higher excellence, yet, as it is, it is a work accomplished'; and not för one Burman, nor for the present age alone, but for all the millions of coming generations, that shall speak the Burman tongue. The same is true of the Karen, the Siamese, the Assamese, and other versions of the Sacred Scriptures, each executed mainly by the hands of a single missionary. It is a totally diverse operation so to use the word of God, written or oral, that it shall effectually avail to others. In this must be tasked the power, mental and moral, not of the giver only, but the receiver. The missionary has many things to say, but who shall hear them? He has knowledge, and faith, and the love of God, to impart, but who are to know and love? Who shall create even the desire to know?

To convert a sinner from the error of his way, even in favoring eircumstances, within a Christian community, where reason, and conscience, and “all things are ready, is a difficult work. It cannot be less difficult to save a soul from amidst the abominations of heathenism. The dark, the brute mind of the heathen is to be enlightened and humanized;—the power of thought is to be quickened, just thoughts infused, imaginations vain and monstrous to be dislodged, some right conception of the one God, of duty, of guilt, of accountability and coming danger, awakened; and a sense of need, of helplessness, and of the preciousness of a free salvation. And then, to preach salvation,―to lift up the cross of Christ to eyes blinded by sin, blind from birth, blind with Cimmerian darkness; to display the glory of the Highest as it shines in the face of Jesus Christ, to minds over which the god of this world, the prince of darkness, has

held perpetual and exclusive sway;—and so to preach as that the Spirit shall open the blind eyes, and unstop the deaf ears, and quicken the sere heart; this, assuredly, cannot be less arduous than in a Christian land, where the institutions of Christianity abound; where its principles and requirements are known from infancy, and their truth and binding authority admitted by all; where the aggregate current of thought and expression sets strong on its behalf; and where, apart from primeval corruption, a profession of Christian faith is almost and altogether as much a matter of course, as to hold to idolatry on a heathen soil. It is to be borne in mind that the missionary preacher stands up alone. An immense multitude are thronged before him; but among them all he sees not one who, when he has poured his strange tidings upon their ears, will take up and repeat the story; not one who, when he shall have departed, will seek to bring back to his own remembrance, or to his neighbor's, the things which he had seen and heard. There is no church of believers in Jesus,-no Sabbath school teacher, no believing father, nor believing mother,-no closet of prayer. The missionary is alone,―he labors alone; and when he ceases to labor, the work ceases. And the awakened inquirer,—if haply there be an inquirer,—he, too, is alone. Alarmed, yet fearful of forsaking the ways of his fathers, and doubting how far to follow his new guide, he looks around on his countrymen in vain for one encouraging sign; he listens, but in vain, for one approving voice. The voice of the stranger is dying upon his ear; and unless the word has been "fastened by the Master of assemblies," he hears that voice no more. To convert a multitude of men moved by one common impulse, sympathizing with and animating one another, would seem comparatively an easy task;— though that were infinitely surpassing mere human agency;—but to isolate and save a soul from the midst of heathenism,—to create an Abdiel surrounded by lost spirits, this is the great power of God.

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The work is great

IN THE MULTITUDE OF ITS SUBJECTS SEVERALLY.

The missionary is sent to convey eternal life not to a single soul,-not to one and another scattered here and there on the confines of heathendom,—not to here a village and there a village,—not to one or another of the castes of men. He is sent to preach the gospel to prince and people, to the poor as to the rich, in high places and low places, in the city and in the jungle. He is sent to all, even to as many as the Lord our God shall call." Yet is he sent as to one soul. He is ambassador not to the national, but the individual mind. Each several mind, before the embassy is accomplished, must have apprehended its design and import, and, unless abandoned to itself by the Spirit of grace, must have cordially embraced it. The work is great. The subjects of its intended operation are numbered by hundreds of millions; and the work is to be wrought in each, if wrought at all, one by one. The population of a single heathen tribe, regarded in connexion with the nature and method of the work to be accomplished for its salvation, is immensely great. The number of the Karens, including their several branches, is by estimate at least 3,000,000 ;-3,000,000, or, if we allow one third for those who die in early infancy, 2,000,000 to be evangelized and made wise unto salvation, man by man. Suppose these two millions to be grouped into villages averaging for each a hundred individuals, and to every twenty villages, more or less remote from one another, assign one missionary; and we need, to evangelize one people, a thousand missionaries.